Deftly symbolizing an aggrieved citizen’s quest for justice, the rightful heir to the Sultanate of Delhi donned a red robe on the eve of battle. She won the people’s support for four years of prosperous rule, but her rivals proved insatiable.

First woman to claim an Egyptian throne since Cleopatra, Shajarat Al-Durr won an Ayyubid sultan and then a crusader war; founded a Mamluk dynasty and ruled as sultana de facto far longer than de jure— until her storied, violent end.

Though her Turkish name Hürrem meant “laughing one,” she proved better at breaking barriers —ﬁrst by marrying the sultan, and later by directing more of the Ottoman Empire’s affairs than any woman before her.

Wife and mother, businesswoman, fashion designer, real estate developer, garden plan-ner, philanthropist devoted to women, battle commander, tiger hunter: For the woman with a royal name meaning “Light of the World,” those were all part of Nur Jahan’s main job—running the Mughal empire.

When she governed the Moroccan coastal city of Tétouan, the Spanish accused her of organizing piracy, while at home she won respect from both Moroccans and post-1492 Andalusian émigrés. On land and sea, hers was a life charted by crisis.

Deftly symbolizing an aggrieved citizen’s quest for justice, the rightful heir to the Sultanate of Delhi donned a red robe on the eve of battle. She won the people’s support for four years of prosperous rule, but her rivals proved insatiable.

First woman to claim an Egyptian throne since Cleopatra, Shajarat Al-Durr won an Ayyubid sultan and then a crusader war; founded a Mamluk dynasty and ruled as sultana de facto far longer than de jure— until her storied, violent end.

Though her Turkish name Hürrem meant “laughing one,” she proved better at breaking barriers —ﬁrst by marrying the sultan, and later by directing more of the Ottoman Empire’s affairs than any woman before her.

Wife and mother, businesswoman, fashion designer, real estate developer, garden plan-ner, philanthropist devoted to women, battle commander, tiger hunter: For the woman with a royal name meaning “Light of the World,” those were all part of Nur Jahan’s main job—running the Mughal empire.

When she governed the Moroccan coastal city of Tétouan, the Spanish accused her of organizing piracy, while at home she won respect from both Moroccans and post-1492 Andalusian émigrés. On land and sea, hers was a life charted by crisis.

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Under Arab, Portuguese, German and English rule, commerce and the town’s strategic location on East Africa’s coast made Bagamoyo a leading port from the 1300s to the late 1800s. Now Tanzania has unveiled a 30-year plan to transform the town and environs into the largest seaport the coast has ever seen and link it, once again, to the rest of the Indian Ocean and China.

Beyond the shadows of Dubai’s skyscrapers lies working-class Satwa, and along its main drag Al Diyafah, a treasure-trove of restaurants serves up a hemisphere-spanning selection of Asian and Near Eastern home-cooking.

Written by Ingrid Bejarano Escanilla and Louis Werner
Art by Belén Esturla

Over his 90-year lifetime, this chronicler of fact and unabashed fancy trekked, sailed, caravanned, studied and traded from the far Arab West to the northern- and easternmost reaches of the 12th-century Islamic world.

When a hand stencil-painting in the caves on this island recently dated to 39,900 years ago, Indonesia took a place alongside France and Spain as a site of the earliest known representational art. Now we must ask not only how and why we began making pictures, but how and why we did so on two continents, at the same time.

To reconstruct memories of her late father’s generation, the artist and author interviewed her father’s peers and made artifact-based portraits of his “unique generation that saw Saudi Arabia at its poorest and later at its richest,” a generation that understands “what it means to build your dreams from scratch.”

It started out as many successful businesses do: with a bit of vision, a prime location and some family connections. From its first Arabic text in 1732 to today, Brill’s books helped build the scholarship of what is today broadly called Middle East and Asian studies.

When Arab Muslims came to rule formerly Byzantine lands in the mid-seventh century CE, they continued using local coins and only gradually issued their own: The story was similar in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia. Viewed through a numismatist’s magnifying glass, it was an age not only of conflict and change, but also of accommodation and pragmatism.

Paved with stones that, according to one Roman writer, “give the appearance not simply of being laid together ... but they seem to have actually grown together,” the Via Egnatia joined East and West under empires both Roman and Ottoman. Much of its 1,100-kilometer length can still be walked and driven, from original-stone footpaths in Albania to a superhighway in Greece.

Born in a refugee camp in Kenya, 19-year-old Somali-American designer Sahro Hassan has won awards as well as acclaim in her hometown of Lewiston, Maine, for “modest fashion” that can appeal to Muslim and non-Muslim women alike.

Strategic and even glamorous at times over 196 years, the American Legation in Tangier, Morocco, is today a neighborhood cultural center where young and old improve reading and writing and learn new skills.